John Steinbeck
Steinbeck (February 27, 1902-- December 20, 1968) was born in Salinas California, a small rural town in a fertile valley west of the Rocky Mountains. He attended Stanford University for five years and never recieved a degree. Of Mice and Men (1937), The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and East of Eden (1952) are his most famous books. The Grapes of Wrath won Steinbeck both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1940. In 1962 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Both Steinbeck's most well-known and lesser-known stories often depicted the struggles of the working class. He often imbued his illustrations of paisanos, drifters and farmer with parallels to mythical or biblical figures. Tortilla Flat portrays the adventures of its characters as reinvention of the tales of King Arthur and his knights. The protagonists in East of Eden reenact the struggle of Cain and Abel. Some considered his characaters and the stories they enacted crass and indecent. Others felt that Steinbeck romanticized his creations. Still others, myself included, believe that it is true that Steinbeck took a different path from minimalists like Hemingway and modernists like Faulkner. We do not think this means, however, that Steinbeck's differences removed the proverbial stamp of merit from his work. Steinbeck, though he was often overcome with visible compassion for his characters, did not waver from portaying hard truths about life. Nor was he squeamish about attaching significance to the ordinary and giving concrete images depicting the forces that govern human actions. I have read several of Steinbeck's books, but East of Eden in particular opened many doors in my mind. It was the first work of literature that I read on my own that truly and powerfully enriched my views on humanity and the world. I had read other books for school that I had enjoyed. I had read works of "literature" before, but I read it because I felt it was the proper thing to do. East of Eden simply engrossed me from beginning to end. The characters all spoke to my personal experience in a way that no work of literature before had done. And even though, the story was relatively simple, the novel nourished in me the appreciation for something larger and more significant that flowed beneath the surface. Reading the book was a religious experience, moreso than anything I had ever experienced in a Church. The relationship between Art and Life, which had always troubled me before, now revealed itself to me. The passage I have chosen illustrates the disturbing indoctrination that takes place when one enters the military: "They'll first strip off your clothes, but they'll go deeper than that. They'll shuck off any little dignity you have-- you'll lost what you think of as your decent right to live and to be let alone to live. They'll make you live and eat and sleep and shit close to other men. And when they dress you up again you'll not be able to tell yourself from the others. you can't even pin a scrap or pin a note on your breast to say, 'This is me-- separate from the rest.'" "I don't want to do it," said Adam. "After a while," said Cyrus, "You'll think no thought the others do not think. You'll know no word the others can't say. And yo'll do things beacuse the others do them. Yo'll feel the danger in any diefference whatever-- adanger to the whole crowd of like-thinking, like-acting men." "What if I don't?" Adam demanded. "Yes," said Cyrus, "sometimes that happens. Once in a while there is a man who won't do what is demanded of him, and do you know what happens? The whole machine devotes itself coldly to the destruction of his difference. They'll beat your spirit and your nerves, your body and your mind, with iron rods until the dangerous difference goes out of you. And if you can't finally give in, they'll vomit you up and leave you stinking outside-- neither part of themselves nor yet free."